Illustrations by Stephanie Dalton Cowan

As a science, medicine is a wonderful art form. Most of its practitioners admit that they have more questions than answers about what goes wrong with the human body and how to fix it. Like us patients, they're waiting for the day when they can wave that little sparkly salt shaker from Star Trek, see what's wrong on a Palm Pilot and deliver a cure via a needle-less injection that makes a shusshing sound. Been to the doctor lately? We ain't even close.

But we're getting there. Medicine, chemistry, biology, physics, computer science--a flight of fields called biomedicine when taken together--are taking hesitant steps toward the sparkly salt shaker. Perhaps more importantly, biomedical researchers are beginning to see how what they know now might extend into the future, a sort of daydreamy bootstrapping. Pomona alumni turn out to be at the forefront of research efforts with the potential to transform the way physicians heal, from basic research to clinical medicine to understanding the health of entire populations. The future is coming...

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